The Harvesting Memories Project: Historical ecology and landscape changes of the Sicani Mountains in Sicily

The Harvesting Memories project aims to investigate the historical landscape dynamics in an inner area of the Sicani Mountains district in Western Sicily (Contrada Castro, Corleone-Palermo). The interdisciplinary approach of the project allowed us to combine and integrate methods from different disciplines such as historical ecology, landscape archaeology, archaeobotany and GIS-based spatial analysis. In this paper some results have been summarized. The comparison between land mosaic change during the last 60 years, the relationship between site catchment area and land suitability and the correlation between archaeobotanical and phytosociological data. This approach underlined the relevance of the historical ecology for understanding landscape trajectories and planning strategy of suitable development of rural areas

The extensions of gravitational soliton solutions with real poles

We analyse vacuum gravitational "soliton" solutions with real poles in the cosmological context. It is well known that these solutions contain singularities on certain null hypersurfaces. Using a Kasner seed solution, we demonstrate that these may contain thin sheets of null matter or may be simple coordinate singularities, and we describe a number of possible extensions through them.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 6 figures included using graphicx; to appear in Gen. Rel. Gra

Preliminary finite element analysis of the stainless-steel liner of the maintainable test cell concept of IFMIF-DONES

The main purpose of IFMIF-DONES facility is to provide a neutron source for irradiating small specimens and producing experimental data of material properties for the construction of DEMO fusion power plant. The Test Cell (TC) of the DONES is a confined and well-shielded room, where the strong irradiation environment is created. The biological shielding of the TC mainly consists of several meters thick concrete walls and shielding plugs, and a stainless-steel liner. The TC liner and the concrete walls are actively cooled by water because of the high volumetric heating coming from nuclear reactions. Although, the TC is designed to be fully functional for the complete life span of the facility, still there is a very low probability of defect of the TC biological shielding due to their exposure of intense neutron and gamma irradiation. Therefore, the original TC configuration, which was a monolithic approach, had to be revised. Due to this reason, at the end of 2019 the project team has changed the TC concept from the monolithic design to the so-called Maintainable TC Concept (MTCC) design, which allows a maintenance possibility in case of unexpected damage

Alexithymia and personality traits of patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Psychological factors, specific lifestyles and environmental stressors may influence etiopathogenesis and evolution of chronic diseases. We investigate the association between Chronic Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) and psychological dimensions such as personality traits, defence mechanisms, and Alexithymia, i.e. deficits of emotional awareness with inability to give a name to emotional states. We analyzed a survey of 100 patients with IBD and a control group of 66 healthy individuals. The survey involved filling out clinical and anamnestic forms and administering five psychological tests. These were then analyzed by using a network representation of the system by considering it as a bipartite network in which elements of one set are the 166 individuals, while the elements of the other set are the outcome of the survey. We then run an unsupervised community detection algorithm providing a partition of the 166 participants into clusters. That allowed us to determine a statistically significant association between psychological factors and IBD. We find clusters of patients characterized by high neuroticism, alexithymia, impulsivity and severe physical conditions and being of female gender. We therefore hypothesize that in a population of alexithymic patients, females are inclined to develop psychosomatic diseases like IBD while males might eventually develop behavioral disorders

Generalized pricing formulas for stochastic volatility jump diffusion models applied to the exponential Vasicek model

Path integral techniques for the pricing of financial options are mostly based on models that can be recast in terms of a Fokker-Planck differential equation and that, consequently, neglect jumps and only describe drift and diffusion. We present a method to adapt formulas for both the path-integral propagators and the option prices themselves, so that jump processes are taken into account in conjunction with the usual drift and diffusion terms. In particular, we focus on stochastic volatility models, such as the exponential Vasicek model, and extend the pricing formulas and propagator of this model to incorporate jump diffusion with a given jump size distribution. This model is of importance to include non-Gaussian fluctuations beyond the Black-Scholes model, and moreover yields a lognormal distribution of the volatilities, in agreement with results from superstatistical analysis. The results obtained in the present formalism are checked with Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

A snapshot on radiotherapy for head and neck cancer patients during the COVID-19 pandemic: a survey of the Italian Association of Radiotherapy and Clinical Oncology (AIRO) head and neck working group

Objectives: The objective of the paper was to assess real-life experience in the management of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients during the COVID-19 pandemic in radiotherapy departments and to evaluate the variability in terms of adherence to American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) and European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) recommendations. Materials and methods: In May 2020, an anonymous 30-question online survey, comparing acute phase of outbreak and pre-COVID-19 period, was conducted. Two sections exploited changes in general management of HNC patients and different HNC primary tumors, addressing specific statements from ASTRO ESTRO consensus statement as well. Results: Eighty-eight questionnaires were included in the demographic/clinical workflow analysis, and 64 were analyzed for treatment management. Forty-eight percent of radiotherapy departments became part of oncologic hubs. First consultations reduced, and patients were addressed to other centers in 33.8 and 18.3% of cases, respectively. Telematic consultations were used in 50% of follow-up visits and 73.9% of multidisciplinary tumor board discussions. There were no practical changes in the management of patients affected by different primitive HNCs. Hypofractionation was not favored over conventional schedules. Conclusions: Compared to pre-COVID era, the clinical workflow was highly re-organized, whereas there were no consistent changes in RT indications and schedules

The Implementation and Food Safety Issues Associated With Poultry Processing Reuse Water for Conventional Poultry Production Systems in the United States

As human populations increase in numbers, access to clean, fresh water is becoming increasingly difficult to balance between agricultural and municipal demands. Water scarcity is a limiting factor of food production in many countries, whether they are emerging or established economies. In conventional poultry processing systems, access to water is particularly critical for the maintenance and disinfection of processing areas, as well as in processing operations such as scalding, chilling, and carcass washing. Therefore, poultry processing plants use an excessive amount of water, limiting where facilities can operate, increasing overhead costs, and ultimately resulting in potential environmental concerns. The need for sustainable alternatives to single-use water supplies is becoming increasingly more urgent. As a result, the implementation of water reuse in poultry-processing plants has emerged as an attractive alternative means to meet water requirements during processing. Because the water is reused, it is essential to de-contaminate the water with chemicals, such as peracetic acid and chlorine, and improve water filtration strategies to kill and remove potential pathogens and contaminants. However, questions remain as to the efficacy of commonly used disinfectants to achieve that goal. Thus, novel strategies must be developed to improve the capabilities of poultry processing plants to counter water insecurity worldwide. These new stratagems must be economical and enable poultry processing plants to reduce their environmental footprint while meeting new food safety challenges. The current review will focus exclusively on water reuse in conventional poultry processing in the United States. The specific objectives of this review are to discuss the approaches for treating processing water in poultry processing systems, including reuse water systems, as well as investigate possible substitutes for maintaining food safety

The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

The “Narratives” collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging